The present disclosure pertains generally to the field of mobile computing. It is often repeated (and sometimes even to music) that it's a small world, for the world has become an increasingly globalized environment. Instead of being consolidated within a compact geographical region centered around a brick-and-mortar office, an enterprise's employees might be spread all over the Earth. Managers of these employees might manage employees located in various different nations, in various different time zones. Even if these employees work during regular business hours, the moments at which some employees are working might overlap only partially or not at all with the moments at which other employees are working. The moments at which employees' managers work might not significantly overlap with the moments at which the employees themselves work.
Complicating this temporal divergence is the fact that modern enterprises often permit their highly talented employees a great deal of flexibility and choice as to the hours in which they work. Thus, even if a set of employees are geographically located within the same or relatively nearby time zones, the differences in those employees' choices of times of day at which they work can reduce the periods in which any significant fraction of them can be found laboring concurrently.
Additionally, in today's world, it has become increasingly challenging to classify a person's activities as being strictly business or strictly pleasure at any given moment. People have learned to multi-task. A person might be able to perform his or her tasks as an employee while simultaneously engaging in other activites that are not work-related. For example, a person might formulate business strategies, programming techniques, legal constructs, etc., while running on a treadmill or lifting weights at a gym, while dining at a restaurant, or while driving or riding from place to place.
In spite of these complications of modern life, enterprises still seek to improve productivity, and productivity traditionally is improved through accountability. Enterprises require their employees to set goals that will further those enterprises' objectives. Enterprises want to measure employees' progress toward completing these goals. Hopefully, enterprises reward those who achieve their goals. However, due to a variety of factors including some discussed above, the measurement of employee performance might not now be as simple as it was once.
If employees only contemplate their goals and the progress they have made toward their goals immediately prior to a review, the employees are less likely to achieve those goals. Conversely, if employees are constantly minding their goals and the progress that they are making toward those goals, those employees are more likely to work in a manner designed specifically to achieve those goals. Unfortunately, the geographical and temporal disperson of an enterprise's employees discussed above, and the resulting isolation that employees may often perceive as a result, may be anything but conducive to helping employees to keep their goals in mind.
Too often, as a person engages in many different activities at once, that person can lose sight of the ultimate purposes behind certain ones of those activities. If, due to geographical and temporal distances and blurred activity definitions, employees only rarely review their progress with their managers, those employees might find that they have neglected to place as much emphasis on their progress as they could, should, and would have.
To the extent that computer-executed applications are available to assist an employee in setting goals and measuring the progress toward those goals, those applications typically require an active connection to a server with which those applications communicate. Those applications typically execute on enterprise-owned non-portable desktop computing machines on which those applications have been professionally installed by the enterprise's information technology professionals. These computing machines will typically be permanently located at the enterprise's office, which might only be accessible during limited business hours. These computing machines and the machine on which the server executes will typically be securely interconnected via an intranet that is intentionally isolated from the outside world. Because modern employees often perform work tasks at various times and in various places other than a brick-and-mortar office, employees just as often might find it inopportune to interface with such applications on a regular basis.
Unlike previous eras, in which a worker's assigned tasks might be dominated by physical effort, the highly intellectual nature of many of today's careers enables employees to labor mentally while engaging in other activities. This is not necessarily to say that those other activities are always absolutely divorced from labor, however. Sometimes, for example, the potentially personal activities in which an employee engages online might very well advance his or her progress towards his or her (or the enterprise's) goals. One popular use of the Internet involves social media. Although such social media can be used for personal, familial, friendly, or romantic purposes, such social media also is often used for business purposes as well. The blurring of the lines between business and pleasure extend into online activities too. In an information society, work may be analogized less and less to physical matter, and more and more to pure energy, while the equation of the two has been lauded as genius.
Sometimes, the activities in which a person engages largely for personal purposes can have beneficial effects in the business domain as well. For example, a person enhancing friendships online might (inadvertently or not) also enhance the chances of establishing a valuable business relationship with his or her contacts. It is well known that face-to-face socializing has long been a legitimate way of garnering clients; there is no reason that the same principles should not apply to online socializing as well.
Employees clearly want to be able to demonstrate, to their managers, the efforts that they have put into pursuing their own goals and those of the enterprise. Such demonstration increases the chances that an employee can obtain a favorable review from his manager, hopefully resulting in rewards such as raises, bonuses, awards, promotions, etc. Unfortunately, the contribution that an employee's online activites have made toward the achievement of his or her goals is currently difficult to establish. Detrimentally to the employee, such online activities are typically forgotten and ignored at review time. A resulting miscalculation of an employee's true productivity and corresponding value clearly works to the enterprise's detriment as well.